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THE DEARBORNS. 



By DANIEL GOODWIN, Jr. 




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PROCEEDINGS. 



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(Chicago ^iBtoxxca( ^ocitt^'s 

PROCEEDINGS. 



THE DEARBORNS. 

By DANIEL GOODWIN, Jr. 




,^^a^/f^>^^n 





FIFIST PRESIDENT OF THE MASSACHirsF'' 



THE DEARBORNS; 

A 

Discourse Commemorative 

OF THE 

Eightieth Anniversary of the Occupation 

OF 

Fort Dearborn, 

AND THE 

First Settlement at Chicago; 

READ BEFORE THE 

Chicago Historical Society, 

Tuesday, Dec. i8, 1883, 



DANIEL GOODWIN. Tr. ; 

with remarks of i 

Hons. John Wentworth, J. Young Scammon, ' 

E. B. Washburne, and I. N. Arnold. i 



CHICAGO: 

FERGUS printing COMPANY. 
1884. 



(b)Ae^ 



7_ 



'3o^ 



CONTENTS. 



Tablet accompanying the portrait of Gen. Henry Dearborn, 5 

Discourse on Henry Dearborn, ----- y 

Discourse on Henry Alexander Scammell Dearborn. - t,7, 

Remarks of Hon. John Wentworth, - - - - 46 

Remarks of Hon. J. Young Scammon, - - - 48 

Remarks of Hon. Elihu B. Washburne, -' - - - 51 

Remarks of Hon. Isaac N. Arnold, - - - - 51 

Letter of Hon. Robert C. Winthrop. - - - - 52 

Letter of Mr. Henry G. R. Dearborn. - - - 53 

Lidex of names and subjects, ----- 54 



Chicago Historical Society, 140 Dearborn Ave., 

December 19, 1883. 
Mr. Daniel Goodwin, Jr., 283 Erie St., 

Dear Sir: — I have the honor to enclose a copy of the reso- 
kition of this Society, adopted at the monthly meeting last 
evening, thanking you for your discourse on the Dearborns and 
asking for a copy of the same for preservation in our archives. 
Also a copy of the resolution acknowledging receipt of a copy 
of Gilbert Stuart's oil portrait of Major-General Henry Dearborn, 
and returning the thanks of this Society to the donors — the 
Messrs. Wirt Dexter, Marshall Field, John Crerar, N. K. Fair- 
bank, E. W. Blatchford, Mark Skinner, and yourself. 
Yours very respectfully, 

Albert D. Hager, Secretary. 

283 Erie Street, Chicago, 

March 5, 1884. 
Mr. Albert D. Hager, Sec. of Chicago Hist. Society, 

Dear Sir: — It gives me great pleasure to comply with the 
request of your Society for a copy of my discourse on "The 
Dearborns" to be preserved in the archives of the Society, and 
in order that the information which I have collected, concerning 
those worthies of former generations, may be more widely 
extended, I have caused the same to be published by the 
Fergus Printing Company of this city, and have requested that 
company to deliver the proceeds derived from the sale of the 
.same into the treasury of your Society. 

Very truly yours, 

Daniel Goodwin, Jr. 



To tlie Cliicago Historical Society: 

TirK Undersigned herewith Present to vour Society 
A COPY OF GILBERT STUART'S portrait of 

MAJOR-GENERAL HENRY DEARBORN, 

Captain of a New- Hampshire Regiment in the 
Battle of Bunker Hill; 

A Soldier through the Revolutionary War 
FROM 1775 TO 1783; 

United States Marshal for the District of 
Maine under President Waspiington; 

Sp:cretarv of War under President Jefferson; 

Collector of the Port of Boston under 
President Madison; 

General-in-Chief of the United States Army 
under President Monroe; 

Born in New Hampshire, 1751; 

Died in, Boston Highlands, 1829. 

Dated at Chicago, Dec. 3, 1883, upon the 

EiciHTiEH Anniversary of the first occupation 

OF Fort Dearborn at Chicago by 

Captain John Wfiistler and a Company of the 

First Regiment United States Infantry. 

^VIRT Dexter, 
Marshall Field, Daniel Goodwin, Jr., 

John Crerar, N. K. Fairbank, 

E. W. PJlatchford, Mark Skinner. 



PROCEEDINGS. 



The regular monthly meeting of the Chicago Historical 
Society was held in its Hall, No. 142 Dearborn Avenue, 
on the 1 8th of December, 1S83. 

Hon. Isaac N. Arnold, president, presided, and Albert 
D. Hager was secretary. 

The Librarian reported the receipt of a number of vol- 
umes, pamphlets, maps, and autograph letters from Messrs. 
Mark Skinner, William Blair, Albert A. Munger, John R. 
Walsh, and Daniel Goodwin, Jr. 

Hon. John Wentworth reported a memorial of the life 
of James Sears Waterman, a member of the Society, lately 
deceased at Sycamore, Illinois. 

The Secretary then read the foregoing memorial tablet, 
which was printed on parchment, with the original signa- 
tures of the donors, and handsomely framed and suspended 
on the wall. 

The President then called upon Mr. Daniel Goodwin, 
Jr., the appointed orator of the evening, who delivered 
the followinsf address: 



THE DEARBORNS 



From the earliest days of recorded histor}-, it has been 
a natural impulse of mankind to honor the names of its 
heroes and its loved ones, those who had taken a strong 
hold upon the popular heart, by giving those names to the 
highways of public travel. In this latest of the great 
aeeregations of human beings are found the names of the 
grand founders and champions of the United States of 
America, marking and defining the highways thronged 
day and night by hosts numbered by hundreds of thou- 
sands. 

As you pass from this building dedicated to history, 
where faithful hands are garnering up the records of the 
past and the present, you will find yourselves on an avenue 
bearing the name of one loved by Washington, trusted by 
Jefferson, and honored by Madison and Monroe; who not 
only fought with, but was the hearty friend of Lafayette 
and Rochambeau, of Greene and Sullivan. 

I have walked along this great thoroughfare which bears 
his name for a quarter of a century, and have often asked 
myself, what were the peculiar merits of this man whose 
name keeps pace with my daily steps.' Where did he live, 
what was his work, who were his friends, what was his 
social life, who and what were his children, how did he die, 
and where now rest his honored bones.' These questions 
traveled with me unanswered until I resolved to look up 



8 THE DEARBORNS. 

the history of that first name which marked this spot when 
it was known only to the government as "Fort Dearborn" 
— a name antedating the birth and infancy of our great 
city; a name identified with the Indian massacre of 1812; 
a name which has kept pace with the growth of a frontier- 
post and Indian-station from a village to a city, and now, 
though but a half-century old, the grand metropolis of the 
Northwest; a name given to one of its social clubs, as well 
as to that scientific observatory overlooking our great har- 
bor, and which once in our own day looked down upon 
12,000 rebellious sons,* whose forefathers fought by the 
side of Henry Dearborn in the bloody fields of the Revo- 
lution or under his banner in the war of 18 12 — sons who, 
thank God, have again learned to keep step to the music 
of the Union! 

The Dearborn family in America began with one God- 
frey Dearborn, who was born in old Exeter, County of 
Devon, England, about the year 1600. He first came to 
the Massachusetts Colony about 1639, but removed to 
Exeter, New Hampshire — thus exchanging the Exeter of 
his native land for the Exeter of the wilderness. Here he 
remained for ten years and then moved to Hampton, where 
he passed the remainder of his life. On his arrival, he 
settled on a farm at West End, which has been occupied 
by his descendants until this time. 

Godfrey Dearborn's eldest son, Henry, was born about 
1633, in England, and came to this country with his father 
in 1639, and resided in Hampton until he was 92 years 
old. He married Elizabeth Marrian in 1666. Their oldest 
son, John Dearborn, settled at North Hampton, and in 

* Dearborn Observatory is on a tower of the Chicago University, ninety 
feet liigh. After the capture of Fort Donelson, the rebel prisoners were 
brought to Chicago, and placed in camp around the University. It was called 
Camp Douglas, and the number of prisoners was increased until they reached 
J2,ooo. 



THE DEARBORNS. 9 

1689, married Abigail Bachelder. He was a deacon in the 
church and a strong character. He died in 1750, aged 84 
years. His ninth child was Simon Dearborn, born 1706, 
in the garrison-house on the Green at North Hampton, 
where his mother had been lodged for security against the 
Indians who were at that time very troublesome. This 
Simon Dearborn married Sarah Marston in 1728, and their 
twelfth child, afterw^ard known as Major-General Henry 
Dearborn, the chief subject of this sketch, was born at 
North Hampton in 175 i. He grew up among the rugged 
hills of New Hampshire one of the finest types of manly 
strength, agility, and beauty. He was tall and straight, 
muscular and agile. He was noted as an unmatched 
wrestler, never .having met his equal, and was an ardent 
sportsman. In all his journeys he carried his gun and rod 
and dog, and was an expert at cricket and ball until long 
past middle life. When not engaged in business or exer- 
cise, he was a constant reader, and was master of as good 
English as the war department has produced. After 
going through some of the best schools in New Hamp- 
shire, he began and completed a full course of medical 
instruction under Dr. Hall Jackson of Portsmouth, a dis- 
tinguished surgeon in the army of the Revolution. 

Dr. Dearborn was settled in the practice of a physician 
at Nottingham three years prior to the Revolution. With 
most of the ablest young men of that vicinity, he em- 
ployed all his leisure in military exercises and studying 
the science of war. " The spirit of the mountains was 
stirred." Liberty was calling out to her sons and number- 
ing them by name, and they saw or felt that the liberties 
of their country would soon be either shamefully surren- 
dered and brutally trodden under foot, or manfully 
defended and cruelly purchased at the sword's point and 
the cannon's mouth. 

The great principles of political liberty had been dis- 



lO THE DEARBORNS. 

cussed and agitated in the school-and-nieeting houses of 
New Hampshire, as well as in the neighboring city of 
Boston, by the ablest minds and most eloquent tongues. 
The whole coast of New England, from Newport Bay to 
the watershed of the St. Lawrence River, was filled with a 
race of men who in their words and deeds exhibited as 
much genius as any set of men the world has produced. 
England alone could not produce their equals nor their 
rivals; nor could Scotland, Ireland, France, or Germany; 
but the patriots of the American Revolution, with tongues 
of fire, with muscles of steel, with heroism born of enthu- 
siasm and sentiment, with clear and defined ideas of 
liberty, governed by law, were the result of a century of 
crossing and recrossing of the most enterprising and fear- 
less men and women of all those countries combined. 
The Pilgrim Fathers, who left country and home and 
friends with almost broken hearts that they might worship 
God in their own way, were there in the greatest propor- 
tion; but the Anglo-Saxon blood, which has always devel- 
oped the richest results when crossed by other races, was 
mingled with the Huguenots of France, the Celts of Ire- 
land, and the Scotch and Dutch. Samuel Adams, the 
finest type of old Puritanism, thundered in the lower and 
popular assembly of the Massachusetts house, while the 
genius of a French Huguenot animated and directed the 
patriots of the upper house or council in James Bowdoin. 
So it was in New Hampshire. Her mountains and valleys 
were peopled by races from many countries and climes; 
the tame and contented had staid at home to bow the 
knee to the tyranny of Stuarts and Bourbons, of Guelphs 
and Hapsburgs; but the most daring and the most liberty- 
loving from all the western nations of Europe had come 
into this wilderness for freedom. They married and in- 
termarried, they fought the Indian and subdued the wilder- 
ness, they knew and understood and loved their political 



THE DEARBORNS. II 

rights; and when George the Second and his good queen 
Carohnc and Lord Walpole died and gave place to George 
Third and liis infamous cabinet, who struck down char- 
tered rights a century old, stopped our commerce, deposed 
our local officers, carried off our citizens for trial to a for- 
eign land, imposed taxes without giving us any represen- 
tation, and, in fine, treated the American colonies as her 
slaves; a race of men was aroused who combined in them- 
selves all the courage of Englishmen, the rushing energy 
of the Huguenot, the dash of the Irish, the stubborn wis- 
dom and endurance of the Scotch, and the firm devotion 
of the Dutch. It was among such men as these that our 
young Dr. Dearborn, only 24 years of age, with an iron 
constitution and a stubborn will, heard the news on the 
20th of April, 1775, that the British army had commenced 
the war at Lexington. There was no waiting for form or 
ceremony. Dearborn and sixty of his young townsfellows 
only knew that their Boston brethren were in danger, and 
before twenty-four hours had run their course, those sixty 
young giants had marched with their own guns over their 
shoulders all the way from Hampton to Cambridge, a dis- 
tance of fifty-five miles. This first march as volunteer 
soldiers was a fair specimen of the endurance of those 
men till the seven years' war was over. After remaining 
several days at Cambridge and finding that there was no 
immediate need for their services, they marched home 
again and continued to prepare for the desperate contest. 
It was at once determined that New Hampshire should 
raise several regiments for the common defence, and Dr. 
Dearborn was appointed a captain in the ist regiment, 
commanded by Col. John Stark. So great was his popu- 
larity that within ten days after he received his commis- 
sion, he enlisted a full company and marched to Medford 
on the 15th of May. He immediately began drilling his 
men, carrying a gun and sword himself and doing as much 



12 THE DEARBORNS. 

work as any of them. Upon his own responsibiUty, he 
began skirmishing with the British for the possession of 
the cattle and stock on Noddles Island, and he and his 
company had two fights with the enemy before the battle 
of Bunker Hill. On the i6th of June, it was determined 
that a fortified post should be established at or near 
Bunker Hill. The decision and its execution led on the 
following day to the battle. Col. Stark's regiment was 
quartered in Medford about four miles from the point of 
anticipated attack. About ten o'clock in the morning, he 
received orders to march. The regiment formed in front 
of the arsenal, and each man, Captain Dearborn among 
them, received a gill-cup full of powder, fifteen balls, and 
one flint. After making all necessary preparations for 
action, they marched about one o'clock, and about two, 
they were stationed about forty yards in the rear of the 
redoubt toward Mystic River. They were soon engaged 
in a heavy action, and Capt. Dearborn stood with his men, 
all of whom were practised shots, and he and they did 
terrible execution witn steady nerves and quick eyes. 
Such a battle was never seen before and is not likely to be 
seen again. The number of Americans in action did not 
exceed 1500; and they killed or wounded nearly as many 
as their whole number, with a loss of but 145 killed and 
304 wounded. Again and again did the brave Britons 
march up against that wall of fire, only to fall back with 
many of their officers and most of their men bleeding or 
dead, until at length the ammunition of the 1500 Ameri- 
cans was exhausted, and no reenforcements of men or 
powder or bayonets were sent them, though Putnam and 
Gerrish were within easy reach and could have gone to 
them by the same road over which the tired fighters were 
obliged to retreat, and the British flag floated over the 
hill which, as many orators have said, cost Britain a con- 
tinent. 



THE DEARBORNS. I 3 

Soon after this terrible battle, it was decided to send an 
expedition to Quebec with a view of taking that Gibraltar 
of North America, and thus commanding the St. Law- 
rence and aiding the Canadas to join the patriot revolu- 
tion. Colonel Benedict Arnold was selected to lead this 
desperate expedition, and Dearborn volunteered to com- 
mand a company. He was allowed to select a picked 
company from the New- Hampshire regiment for this 
arduous service. Capt. Dearborn kept a daily journal of 
the expedition, and the original manuscript is now in the 
Boston Public Library. Through the courtesy of Judge 
Chamberlain, I was recently permitted to occupy a table 
in their directors' room, made superb by the marble busts 
and portraits of many of the greatest of Massachusetts' 
dead, and I copied the record of that march from the 
brown old pages which the young soldier penned more 
than 100 years ago. It was a march attended by every 
hardship which human nature is capable of enduring — 
bodily fatigue, desertion of three whole companies of men, 
loss of ammunition and guns and baggage, fording streams 
as cold as ice, braving tempests; and at last, famished 
and starving, less than half of the brave fellows who 
started reached the St. Lawrence River. Dearborn was 
prostrated by a fever for thirty days in a rude hut with no 
medicine or attendance save that of a French boy. On 
the 9th December, he rejoined his company, who had sup- 
posed him dead. Then came the attack on Quebec; the 
death of Montgomery ; the wounding of Arnold ; the 
failure of the attack; their capture; his confinement at 
Quebec, where they all had the small -pox and most of 
them were put in irons. In May, 1776, he was released 
on parole, and, after hardships nearly as great as those 
attending the expedition, he reached his home in July. 

The next chapter of Dearborn's career began in Jan- 
uary, 1777. On the 24th, he was exchanged and relieved 



14 THE DEARBORNS. 

from his parole, and on the very next da}% he left his wife 
and children and repaired to the main army at New York, 
where he was made major of the 3d New-Hampshire Regi- 
ment under Col. Scammell, that brave bachelor whom 
Daniel Webster said he could never read of without be- 
ing much affected. On the 10th of May, he set out for 
Ticonderoga and arrived on the 20th, and took part in 
that council of war where the brave but unfortunate 
St. Clair was obliged to retire before an overwhelming 
fleet and army. Dearborn, no braver but more fortunate 
than his general, retreated from Ticonderoga through the 
Green Mountains of Vermont, a circuit of more than 150 
miles to Saratoga, and took conspicuous part in the 
famous capture of the same army and general who had 
driven them out of Ticonderoga. Most of us have read 
of that series of remarkable battles in the glowing pages 
of your distinguished president, Mr. Arnold. 

Dearborn's old yellow diary says, "Aug. 11. I am 
appointed to the command of 300 light infantry who are 
drafted from the several regiments in the Northern army 
to act in conjunction with Col. Morgan's corps of Rifle- 
men." A strong position was selected, called Bemis 
Heights, and occupied by the American army. The rifle- 
men and Dearborn's corps of light infantry encamped in 
advance to the left of the main line. The British arm\' 
had advanced from Saratoga and encamped on the bank 
of the river within three miles of Gates' position. On the 
19th of September, the right wing of the British army 
moved, when Morgan and Dearborn, who commanded 
separate corps, received orders from vXrnold to make a 
forward movement and check them. These orders were 
promptly obeyed and the charge was led by Dearborn in 
person in the most gallant and determined manner. The 
action at once became general and continued till night on 
the same ground on which it began; neither party having 



THE DEARBORNS. I 5 

retreated more than thirty rods, so that the dead of both 
armies were mingled together. 

On the 7th of October, Burgoyne determined to make 
a last effort to gain possession of the American position 
and to open a passage for his army to Albany, where he 
expected to join the British forces which had gained com- 
mand of the Hudson River. About ten o'clock, he ad- 
vanced with a fine train of artillery, and after driving in 
our pickets appeared in full view on the left of Gates' line 
in open ground. Morgan and Dearborn were ordered by 
Arnold to advance and hold the enemy in check. They 
advanced rapidly, and in a few minutes, were engaged 
with the enemy; but soon after received orders to move in 
such a direction as to meet and oppose any body of the 
enemy that might try to occupy the eminence command- 
ing our left wing. In this movement about 500 of the 
enemy under Earl Balcarres were met and dispersed by 
one fire and bayonet charge led by Dearborn himself. 
Balcarres reformed behind a fence, and being again 
attacked by Dearborn, Morgan, and Gen. Poor's brigade, 
the whole British line, commanded by Burgoyne in per- 
son, gave way and retired to their camp. Dearborn bore 
directly on the rear of the right wing, where the British 
artillery was posted under cover of some German troops, 
ran rapidly up to the pieces, and when within thirty yards, 
threw in such a deadly fire as to kill and disperse the 
whole covering party, as well as most of the artillery-men. 
The artillery was captured. Maj. Williams, its commander, 
was killed, and Sir Francis Clarke and other officers were 
wounded. Dearborn sent Clarke, one of Burgoyne's aids, 
to his own tent, where he died that night, first giving his 
pistols to Dearborn, a pair of most memorable arms, which 
now hang over the library door of his grandson, Henry 
G. R. Dearborn, in Roxbury. Instantly upon taking the 
cannon, Dearborn sent them round to the right of the 



1 6 THE DEARBORNS. 

British army, then advanced his hne within sixty yards of 
the enemy's rear, and poured in a full fire from his whole 
corps, which drove the enemy in great disorder to their 
fortified camp. The whole American army then advanced 
upon the British; and while Arnold, with Dearborn's corps 
and several regiments of infantry, assaulted and carried 
the German fortified camp on the right, Gen. Poor and his 
New- Hampshire line attacked Eraser's camp, which the 
enemy abandoned. It was then nearly dark. In the 
assault on the German camp, Arnold, who leaped his 
horse over the ramparts, received a severe wound in his 
leg and his horse fell upon him, dead. Dearborn ran to 
him and helped him from under his horse and asked him 
if he was badly hurt. He answered with great warmth, 
*'Yes, in the same leg that was wounded at Quebec. I 
can never go into action without being shot. I wish the 
ball had gone through my heart." 

Early next morning. Dearborn's corps, with about looo 
infantry, advanced over the field of battle into the rear of 
the enemy's main position to prevent Burgoyne from re- 
treating toward Canada. Next day began the great 
retreat of the whole British force, which was so vigorously 
followed up by our light troops and victorious patriots 
that on the 19th, the whole British army was captured 
and surrendered. The entry in Dearborn's journal, Octo- 
ber 19, is, "This day the great Mr. Burgoyne with his 
whole army surrendered themselves as prisoners of war 
with all their public stores ; and after grounding their 
arms, marched off for New England. The greatest con- 
quest ever known. The campaign has cost the British 
10,250 men, forty-seven pieces of brass artillery, and a 
vast quantity of stores, baggage, etc." 

It is a remarkable circumstance that one of the British 
prisoners taken with Burgoyne was the John Whistler, 
who afterward joined the American army and was sta- 



THE DEARBORNS. 1/ 

tioned at Detroit in 1803 under Major Pike, came here 
that summer and built Fort Dearborn, commanded and 
Hved in it for many years, and had two children born 
here. 

Gen. Gates, in his official report of the battle of Sara- 
toga, especially praised the bravery and good conduct of 
Dearborn. He was promoted to be lieutenant-colonel, his 
special corps of light infantry was broken up, and the sev- 
eral officers went back to their own regiments. 

In the meantime, we had lost forts Montgomery and 
Clinton on the Hudson, and the British were coming up 
the river and burning its towns; and before resting from 
their terrible efforts with Burgoyne, the whole New-Hamp- 
shire line was ordered to make all speed to Albany, to 
check the progress of the British up the river. They 
marched that forty miles over muddy roads, and forded 
the Mohawk River below the falls in fourteen hours, car- 
rying both artillery and baggage -wagons. It was the 
most remarkable march of the war and it saved Albany; 
for Clinton at once turned and went back to the City of 
New York. 

Before the year was over, we find our young hero in a 
new field of war under the eye of that greatest of leaders, 
Gen. Washington himself, at Germantown. In the first 
week of December, 1777, he was constantly skirmishing 
and fighting with the unconquerable brigade of New 
Hampshire, which, as Daniel Webster said at the great 
banquet of New-Hampshire Sons in Boston in 1849, "left 
their honored dead on every battle-field of the Revolution." 

Dearborn's journal says, "Dec. 7. The enemy retreated 
toward Germantown and into Philadelphia, which must 
convince the world that Mr. Howe did not dare to fight 
us unless he could have the advantage of the ground. 
Dec. 18. Thanksgiving Day through the whole continent 
of America, but God knows we have very little to keep 
2 



1 8 THE DEARBORNS. 

it with, this being the 3d day we have been without flour 
or bread, and are hving on a high uncultivated hill in huts 
and tents, laying on the cold ground. Upon the whole, I 
think all we have to be thankful for, is that we are alive and 
not in the grave with so many of our friends. We had 
for Thanksgiving breakfast some exceeding poor beef, 
which had been boiled, and now warmed in an old frying- 
pan, in which we were obliged to eat it, having no plates. 
T dined or supped at Gen. Sullivan's today, and so ended 
Thanksgiving. Dec. 19. The army marched about five 
miles and encamped near a height, where we are to build 
huts to live in this winter. Dec. 31. Having obtained 
leave from Gen. Washington, I intend to set out for home 
next Sunday. God grant me a happy sight of my friends." 

"1778, Jan. 3. Received my commission as lieut.-col. to 
Col. Scammell and sent out for home. i8th. Arrived safe 
home and found all well." Here follow several lines erased 
and scrawled over, as if some bit of tenderness had fallen 
from that young soldier's heart at meeting again his wife 
and two little girls, too sacred for any stranger eye. 

On the 22d of April, he again left his little brood and 
joined the main army at Valley Forge. On the 17th of 
May, he says, "I dined at Gen. Washington's. May 19. 
A detachment of 2000 men marched out today, com- 
manded by Marquis Lafayette." Here follow several 
pages of vivid description of the battle of Monmouth. 
Dearborn's regiment first acted under orders from Lee, 
until the army was thrown into confusion and began to 
retreat, when Washington in person turned the tide and 
converted the defeat into a victory. On this change of 
battle. Dearborn received his orders directly from the 
mouth of Washington. He ends by saying, "The enemy'.s 
loss in the battle was 327 killed, 500 wounded, and 95 
prisoners. Our loss, 63 killed, 210 wounded. Here ends 
the famous battle of Monmouth." 



THE DEARBORNS. 19 

In the general orders of the next day, Washington 
bestowed the highest commendation on the brilhant 
exploit of the New- Hampshire regiment. Col. Brooks, 
the adjutant of Lee's division, afterward governor of Mas- 
sachusetts, declared that the gallant conduct of the New- 
Hampshire regiment was the salvation of the army and 
turned the tide from defeat to victory. 

In 1779, Col. Dearborn was at one time in command of 
the forces at New London and was moving from place to 
place through Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, 
being in April in command of a whole brigade, and then 
accompanied Gen. Sullivan's expedition against the Six 
Nations of Indians in Western New York. In 1780, he 
was with the main army in New Jersey, and attended the 
funeral of his old commander and brother-in-law. Gen. 
Poor, described as the most magnificent and solemn 
through the war. In 1781, he was made a quartermaster- 
general, and served with Washington in Virginia, and was 
at the siege of Yorktown and the capture of Cornwallis 
and his army, where he lost his dearly-loved friend, Col. 
Scammell, the popular adjutant of the army and for whom 
both he and Gov. Brooks named their sons. In 1782, he 
was at Newburgh, N.Y., and from thence in camp at Sara- 
toga, where, on November 3d, he says, "We hear from 
headquarters that a general peace is very nearly agreed 
upon." He was ordered to New York and embarked his 
regiment on the i6th for Newburgh, where they encamped 
for the winter. In June, 1783, the New-Hampshire line 
was reduced to one regiment; and on the loth, he was 
honorably discharged after eight years of the most active 
service. 

From his twenty-fourth to his thirty-third year, Henr^- 
Dearborn was personally present and personally fought 
with gun and sword at Bunker Hill, Quebec, Saratoga, 
Monm.outh, and Yorktown. His commanders were as 



20 THE DEARBORNS. 

varied as the territory over which he fought. Stark, 
Arnold, St. Clair, Gates, Greene, Sullivan, and Washington, 
all saw his gallant conduct, and he had the confidence and 
approbation of them all. Of the thirteen captains, who 
began with Dearborn in the gallant New-Hampshire bri- 
gade, only. Col. Reid remained with him till the close of 
the war. Twenty-five years after the war, Gen. Reid was 
sheriff and attending court at Exeter. He said, 'T saw 
a carriage passing and heard a voice exclaim, ' Hello, 
George!' I looked up and answered, 'Harry, is that you.'' 
We went to the hotel together and had a grand time. I 
had not seen him for twenty- five years." A gentleman 
present, said, "Gen. Reid, how could you get along with 
such a democrat as Gen. Dearborn is.'" Reid paused a 
moment and said, "I always was sorry Harry was a demo- 
crat, but that is of no consequence among old officers. 
He is a noble fellow; there is no man I esteem and love 
more, and if Jefferson had always made as good appoint- 
ments as Dearborn to the war-office, I should think much 
better of him than I do now." 

Many old accounts and receipts, and some stirring war- 
songs and tender bits of love and sentiment fill the pages 
in the back of Dearborn's diary; songs and ballads which 
cheered the lonely hut or breezy tent, while cold and 
hunger, the loss of brave comrades, and the awful uncer- 
tainties of the future, were weighing down those brave 
spirits who fought our battles, and gained for us a free 
land, one hundred years ago. 

In March, 1783, Col. Dearborn wrote in his journal, 
"Here ends my military life." In that same month was 
born to him in his home in Exeter his first and the only 
son who survived him. I have purposely omitted the sad 
record in 1778, which told of the illness of his young wife, 
of the eleven long days of travel from the camp to his 
home, of her death and funeral, of his parting with his 



THE DEARBORNS. 21 

two little girls, and his return to the battle-field. His first 
wife was Mary, daughter of Gen. Bartlett of New Hamp- 
shire. In 1780, he married Dorcas, daughter of Col. Osgood 
of Andover, and this marriage was blessed, during his last 
year of Revolutionary service, by the birth of that son 
whose love made the sunshine of his old age, and whose 
genius adorned the halls and rostrums, and beautified the 
hills and valleys of New England. One of the supremest 
blessings, vouchsafed by the Great Father who made us, 
that of seeing his own son grow up by his side, gifted, 
good, and loving, denied to Washington, to Jefferson, to 
Samuel Adams, was not denied to Dearborn. In 1784, 
he moved his family to Pittson, on the Kennebec River.* 

* When General Dearborn went up the Kennebec River on the expedition to 
Quebec, in 1775, he was so impressed by the beauty of the country that soon 
after the war, in 1 784, he decided to settle at Pittston, the head of its naviga- 
tion. The town of Pittston, which then included all of Gardiner and Pitts- 
ton, was named for James Pitts of Boston. The whole valley of the Kenne- 
bec, from its mouth to Augusta, belonged to the Kennebec Company. John 
Adams in his diary, February 15, 1771, says: "I am going tonight to Mr. 
Pitts' to meet the Kennebec Co. — Bowdoin, Gardiner, Hallowell, and Pitts. 
There I shall hear philosophy and politics in perfection from H. ; high flying, 
high church, high state from G. ; sedate, cool moderation from B. ; and warm, 
honest, frank whigism from P." Mr. Pitts' house then stood where the 
Howard Athenteum now stands. The town of Pittston was laid out in eleven 
farms, fronting one mile wide each on the river, and five miles deep, which 
were set off to Benjamin Hallowell, Samuel Goodwin, Francis Whitmore, 
Rev. Mr. Stone, Wm. Bowdoin, Thomas Hancock, James Pitts, and James 
Bowdoin. It was first called Gardiner, after one of the Kennebec Co., but 
he sided with the Tories and left the country, and the citizens demanded a 
change of name to some patriot. The bill to incorporate the town passed 
the Massachusetts House in January, 1779. John Pitts, the oldest son of 
James, was then speaker of the House. Another son, Lendall Pitts, was 
leader of the tea party (Drake's "Old Land-marks of Boston," p. 498), and 
in honor of their family, the town was named Pittston. The only daughter 
of James Pitts married Col. Jonathan Warner of Portsmouth (Wentworth's 
Gen., vol. i, p. 316), who was with Stark and Dearborn in the Revolu- 
tionary War. 

The only child of John Pitts married Robert Brinley, whose father lived 
many years in the celebrated "Brinley Place," which Gen. Dearborn bought 



22 THE DEARBORNS. 

Immediately on the organization of the government, Presi- 
dent Washington appointed him U. S. marshal for the 
District of Maine in 1790. The State of Massachusetts 
appointed him a major-general of militia, he having first 
been elected by the field-officers. He was elected member 
of Congress in 1792 and 1795, and notwithstanding his 
devotion to Gen. Washington, he opposed the Jay treaty 
as being derogatory to the honor of his country — a treaty 
which rave us nothing and assured us nothing. 

In 1794, Louis Philippe, afterward king of France, and 
Talleyrand visited General Dearborn at Pittston, and 
remained several days. Talleyrand fell into the river 

in 1809 and where he or his son lived until about 1850. Mr. Thomas C. 
Amory, the grandson and historian of General Sullivan, told me that he 
went there when a boy, in 1825, as a friend of young H. G. R. Dearborn, 
to see the Marquis Lafayette and a grand company of notables at dinner. 
This house was the headquarters of General Ward, commander-in-chief, in 

'775- 

Wlien Gen. II. A. S. Dearborn completed the erection of Fort Preble, in 
Portland Harbor, it was placed under the command of Thomas Pitts of the 
U. S. 4th Artillery, a grandson of James Pitts, and his ist-lieutenant, Augus- 
tus Hobart, was a grandson of Gen. Henry Dearborn— son of Sophie Dear- 
born and Dudley Hobart. This company served under Dearborn on the 
St. Lawrence River in 1 812-3, and young Hobart was killed by a cannon- 
ball. While at Fort Preble, in 1810, Maj. Thomas Pitts had a son born in 
the fort, the late Samuel Pitts of Detroit. After Samuel Pitts had graduated 
at Harvard and studied law with Judge Story, he went to Detroit about 1833 
with a letter of introduction from Gen. H. A. S. Dearborn to Gen. Charles 
Earned, who had served under the elder Dearborn in the war of 1812. 
Earned M-as major of a Kentucky regiment under Gen. Harrison, which was 
incorporated into the regular army and stationed at Detroit. He was mus- 
tered out in 1816 and remained in Detroit the remainder of his life, and reared 
a large and influential family there. One of his sons-in-law was Gen. Alpheus 
' S. Williams, who distinguished himself in the Mexican war and in the war of 
the rebellion. He was father-in-law of the late-lamented and talented Col. 
Francis U. Farquhar of the regular army. Mr. Pitts succeeded to General 
Earned's business and was his executor and trustee. Another of General 
Earned's pupils and a partner for some lime of Mr. Pitts was Senator Jacob 
M. Howard, a lawyer of most eminent ability, whose eloquence was admired 
by almost every citizen of Michigan. 



THE DEARBORNS. 23 

while fishing at Hallovvell, and was saved by a Httle boy 
holding to him his fishing-rod. 

Gen. Dearborn, while in Congress, established such a 
reputation as a speaker and political leader that, when the 
federal party under John Adams was supplanted by the 
republican party in 1801, President Jefferson at once in- 
vited Gen. Dearborn into his cabinet as secretary of war. 
It was the highest compliment which could well be paid 
to any man, for at that time the cabinet consisted of only 
four — the secretary of state, of war, of the treasury, and 
of the navy; and it was especially marked because the 
office had been filled under Adams by Samuel Dexter, 
one of the greatest men our country has produced. His 
fame as a lawyer has been placed upon the highest pin- 
nacle by Webster, Story, and Sargent, and his administra- 
tive power was such that John Adams said of him in a 
letter to Vanderkemp, May 26, 18 16, "I have lost the 
ablest friend I had on earth in Mr. Dexter." Although 
Mr. Dexter was one of the leaders of the federal party. 
President Jefferson retained him in his cabinet as secretary 
of the treasury for nearly a year. It was a marked tribute 
to the ability of a great opponent, whose presence and 
advice at Washington must have been peculiarly gratify- 
ing to Gen. Dearborn, who was thus easily inducted into 
the office of secretary of war, which he filled from 1801 
to iSoQ.'"' 

It was during this period that the point of land now 
•occupied by Chicago was selected for a fort and was first 
used by white men as a home. Hon. John Wentworth's 
exhaustive paper on Fort Dearborn, published in 1881, 
has Dearborn's letter to Gen. Wilkinson in 1804, stating 
his views on the best mode of protecting our frontier. 

* It is peculiarly fitting and appropriate that the list of donors of the oil 
portrait of Gen. Henry Dearborn, given to this Society, should be headed 
by Mr. Dexter, a grandson of the secretary of war under Adams, who pre- 
ceded Dearborn as secretary of war under Jefferson. 



24 THE DEARBORNS. 

Gen. James Grant Wilson published an article in 1862, 
saying that Fort Dearborn was first occupied by Capt. 
John Whistler and a company of the First Regiment of 
U. S. Infantry on December 3d, 1803. He has recently 
furnished me a letter not published, written in April, 1803, 
by the Abbotts of Detroit to Abbott and Maxwell of 
Mackinac, saying that Capt. Whistler had gone to Chicago 
with troops to erect a fort.* In the Army Report of Dec. 
31, 1803, Fort Dearborn is included as one of the national 
forts. Gen. Wilson says he had it from Dr. John Cooper, 
stationed at Fort Dearborn in 1808, and that he had it 
from Capt. Whistler that the fort was first occupied on the 
3d of December, 1803. At that time there was but one 
other house in Chicago, a log-cabin on the north-side, 
owned and occupied by Pierre LeMay, a French-Canadian 
trader, and his Indian wife. 

The log-cabin and the fort of 1803 have given place to 
this collosal emporium, and when, twenty years hence, our 
successors shall celebrate the one -hundredth anniversary 
of the first occupation of Fort Dearborn, it will undoubt- 
edly be among a million of people in a city far surpassing 

* New York, 23 Nov., 1883. 

My Dear Goodwin :— My authority for the statement that Fort Dear- 
born was occupied on the third of December, 1803, is the war department, 
confirmed by Dr. John Cooper, who was stationed at Fort Dearborn as sur- 
geon's-mate as early as 1808. 

Among other unpublished manuscripts in my possession, which I hope soon 
to use in a reliable History of Chicago, is a letter dated "Detroit, April 30, 
1803," which says: "The Cincinnati mail arrived here two days ago, and 
brings accounts of a garrison being immediately erected at Chicago. Capt. 
Whistler is to have command of the garrison, and will leave this in a few 
days with his company, which consists of 80 men, to go and erect the garri- 
son. This is a good opening for you if you wish to extend your trade. Cap- 
tain Whistler wishes that we could send a store there. 

P. S. since writing. — Capt. Whistler has only taken six men with him to 
go and examine the ground and report to Major Pike, here. " 

The writers of the letter were Robert and James Abbott, a firm of Detroit 



THE DEARB(3RNS. 2$ 

in commerce, wealth, and grandeur any city of tlie world 
prior to the present century. 

Gen. Dearborn's administration of the war department 
was acceptable to the whole country. When he left the 
office, a committee of political opponents examined his 
department and reported everything correct. President 
Madison appointed him collector of the port of Boston in 
1809. During this year, his grandson, Henry G. R., was 
born in the old Brinley Place at Roxbury, near which he 
now lives and where he treasures the admirable portraits 
of his father and grandfather by Gilbert Stuart; the arms, 
badges, and commissions made historic by brave deeds; 
and many shelves of manuscript letters, books, and docu- 
mentary records of the wars of 1776 and 18 12. 

While Gen. Dearborn was secretary of war, his son, the 
younger general, had spent two years at Williams College, 
Mass., and two years at William & Mary's College, Va., 
and had studied law with Judge Story at Salem. Here, 
in 1807, when twenty- four years of age, he married the 
daughter of Col. William Raymond Lee. He had already 

merchants, and it is addressed to Abbott & Maxwell, merchants at Michili- 
mackinac. * * * Very faithfully yours, 

Jas. Grant Wilson. 

Dr. Cooper's statement to Gen. Wilson is corroborated by the claim of 
Major Wm. Whistler (see Wentworth's "Early Chicago," p. 12) that he 
came here in 1803, as a second lieutenant in his father's company. Also by 
the statement of Mrs. Wm. Whistler, quoted by Mr. Went worth, p. 13, ib., 
from H. H. Hurlbut's "Chicago Antiquities," that she was married to Lieut. 
Wm. Whistler in 1802, and that in the summer of 1803, Capt. Whistler's 
company was ordered from Detroit to Chicago to occupy the post and build 
the fort; that she and her young husband and his father and Mrs. Whistler 
came to Chicago by the U. S. schooner Tracy, and the company came over- 
land conducted by Lieut. James S. Swearingen. That the fort was finished and 
occupied in 1803, is certain from the fact that the army return of December 31, 
1803, states the number of officers and men on duty at Fort Dearborn Chi- 
cago, Illinois Territory. See also "American State Papers," Vol. L, p. 175. 



26 THE DEARBORNS. 

commenced public life by superintending the construction 
and armament of the forts in Portland Harbor. 

In 1812, a second war of independence was forced upon 
us by an accumulation of insult and injury, which drove 
the people to arms, notwithstanding the protest and oppo- 
sition of New England. The Jay treaty had failed to 
bring us anything like fair treatment from Great Britain. 
They boarded our vessels and impressed thousands upon 
thousands of our best seamen; they refused to give up 
the forts within our territories on the Northwest frontier; 
and made them rallying points for swarms of Indian sav- 
ages, who plundered, burned, killed, tortured, and scalped 
men, women, and children with indiscriminate brutality. 

In January, 18 12, Congress passed an act adding 20,000 
to our military establishment and providing for two major- 
generals and five brigadier-generals, and at once President 
Madison asked Dearborn to accept the first appointment 
as senior major-general; and the man who wrote in 1783, 
"Here ends my military life," was called, twenty-nine years 
later, to again buckle on his sword. "Our eyes," wrote 
Madison, "could not but be turned to your qualifications 
and experience. I hope you will so far suspend all other 
considerations as not to withhold your consent, as quickly 
as possible." Gen. Dearborn informed the president that 
his life had been devoted to the service of his country, 
and he felt himself bound to obey her commands when- 
ever his services were required. He was then appointed, 
and on the 28th of January, was confirmed, and the very 
day after receipt of the appointment, he left Roxbury for 
Washington. His son, Henry Alexander Scammell Dear- 
born, though but twenty- nine years old, was appointed 
collector of the port of Boston, commandant of the forts, 
and general of the local military forces there. Gen. Dear- 
born, at Washington, at once laid out the plans of an 
active campaign on the northern and northwestern frontier, 



thb: dearborns. 27 

and in person at Albany directed the establishment of 
barracks, depots of arms and provisions, and the whole 
material of war. From there he went to Boston and 
adopted all the measures possible for putting the garrisons 
and sea-coasts of Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachu- 
setts, New Hampshire, and Maine in the best posture of 
defence. 

A declaration of war was made by Congress on the i8th 
of June, 18 12; but it was regarded by many as only a 
threat to bring Great Britain to face the necessity of treat- 
ing us fairly or be involved in war. There was almost 
universal opposition to the war in Massachusetts and most 
of New England; and when General Dearborn called 
upon Governor Caleb Strong for troops to aid the federal 
government, the governor, under the unanimous advice of 
the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, refused the call as 
being unwarranted by the Constitution. They took the 
ground that the State authorities alone were the judges of 
when the necessity had arisen to arm in defence of the 
general welfare, and they were heartily opposed to being 
forced into a war with Great Britain, to the utter destruc- 
tion, as they thought, of their commercial interests. This 
opinion prevailed in many of the states, and with most 
disastrous effects, for at some of the most critical points 
of the war, certain state troops refused to cross the line 
between their own State and Canada. The moment Gov. 
Strong saw danger of invasion of his own State, in defi- 
ance of the wishes of his party and his Supreme Court, 
he entered into hearty cooperation with both Gen. Dear- 
born and his son, and so thoroughly manned the forts and 
harbors that the British fleet, which disgracefully burned 
Portland and other peaceful cities on the coast, did not 
venture to attack old Boston. It was neither the first nor 
the last time that old Elder Strong's blood and brains fur- 
nished the right man in the right place for his country's 
honor, as the roll-call of the Army of the Tennessee in 



28 THE DEARBORNS. 

our own day will testify.* It is one of the misfortunes 
necessarily incident to our free republican government 
that when war is forced upon us, it finds us unprepared 
in training and discipline to cope with the veteran officers 
and soldiers of arbitrary governments, who maintain stand- 
ing armies; and another is that the secretary of war and 
Congress and the public through the newspapers, each in 
turn try to take the direction of the war. In the war of 
1812, we commenced with a few old Revolutionary sol- 
diers, few of whom had seen service for twenty- five years, 
and then only as colonels. Although Dearborn and his 
associates had laid out a careful plan by which Hull was 
to command independently on the Northwestern frontier, 
and Van Rensellaer on the Niagara frontier, and Dearborn 
on the Northeastern frontier, with headquarters at Albany 
or Sackett's Harbor, intending to move down the St. Law- 
rence and take Montreal and Quebec, repeating the vision- 
ary experiment of 1776, no sooner had the fight begun 
than the secretary of war began to direct the whole 
machinery at Washington. We had no telegraph system 
by which organized and cooperative action could at once 
be secured, and no railroads or steamboats, and relied only 
upon the man and his horse for conveying orders over a 
frontier of over two thousand miles. The surrender of our 
fort and army at Detroit, -j- the destruction of Fort Dear- 

* Benjamin W. Dwight, LL. D., in his History of the Strong family, has a 
list of nearly a thousand of the descendants of Elder John Strong of North- 
ampton, who have been soldiers and officers in the army and navy. Among 
others are Gen. Thos. E. G. Ransom, Cien. Thomas J. Strong, Gen. James 
Clark Strong, Col. James F. Dwight, and Richard Stanley Tuthill, U. S. 
Attorney at Chicago. The special reference in the text is to a member of 
this Society, Gen. William Emerson Strong, who is in the seventh generation 
from Elder Strong. From captain of a Wisconsin company he rose to be 
inspector-general of the Army of the Tennessee. Since 1867, he has resided 
in Chicago, and been a contributor to this Society. 

t A most admirable review of Gen. Hull's surrender, trial, and conviction 
forms the eleventh chapter of Chief-Justice James V. Campbell's "Political 
History of Michigan." 



THE DEARBORNS. 29 

born and the massacre of its garrison and the men, women, 
and children who then dwelt on the spot where we now 
live, are subjects too familiar to us all and too painful to 
dwell upon. The effect of these disasters was to upset 
all of Dearborn's plans. But the terrible disasters of our 
western departments, though it changed his plans, did not 
check the energy of Gen. Dearborn, and during the winter 
of 18 1 2 and 1813, he was employed in recruiting and drill- 
ing for the coming year, and he raised around him and 
drilled into useful service some of the most magnificent 
young officers our country has produced: Scott, Taylor, 
Wool, Brady, Ripley, Gaines, and others. His expeditious 
movements in 18 13, with the regular army, preserved Sack- 
ett's Harbor when abandoned by the militia, and secured 
our fleet from destruction by the British. In April, though 
so prostrated with sickness and fever that he had to be 
carried from his bed to his horse, he commanded in per- 
son at the battle of York, resulting in the first great vic- 
tory of the war, when we captured the enemy's stores and 
several gun-boats. 

Then came the attack upon Niagara and Fort George, 
and the taking of those strongholds. In the meantime, 
Gen. Lewis, the brother-in-law of Armstrong, the new 
secretary of war, was plotting to secure the removal of 
Gen. Dearborn, and during a severe fit of fever, he was 
relieved by order of the secretary "until his health should 
be reinstated." By the time the order was received, July 
14, 181 3, the iron constitution of the general had con- 
quered the disease, and he was rapidly convalescing. The 
indignation of his brilliant staff of officers was great; they 
immediately met and addressed a letter to him, which, 
considering the men who wrote it, was quite remarkable. 
They declared "that in their judgment the circumstances 
render his continuance with the army of the first import- 
ance, if not indispensable to the good of the service. The 
knowledge we possess of your numerous services in the 



30 THE DEARBORNS. 

ardent struggles of our glorious Revolution, not to speak 
of more recent events, has given us infinitely higher confi- 
dence in your ability to command with energy and effect 
than we can possibly feel in ourselves or in those who will 
be placed in stations of increased responsibility by your 
withdrawal from this army. We earnestly entreat you to 
continue in the command which you have already held 
with honor to yourself and country." But Gen. Dearborn 
did not feel at liberty to continue in command. The sec- 
retary of war went to the field of operations and under- 
took the command himself with great discredit to our arms. 
Gen. Dearborn at once retired and demanded a court of 
inquiry, but so soon as President Madison learned of his 
restoration to health, he appointed him to the command 
of the district of New York, which was the heart of the 
continent, and was threatened by the British with the fate 
of Eastport and Washington, and when Congress proposed 
to increase the army by 30,000, he determined to appoint 
Dearborn general-in-chief of the whole army. But a gen- 
eral peace was declared in January — a peace which settled 
the independence of America on a sure footing. Though 
Great Britain did not confess her errors, she abandoned 
the claims for which we went to war, and she learned a 
respect for us as a nation, which she had never shown 
before. The victory of Perry on Lake Erie, when, for the 
first and only time in her history, an entire British fleet 
was captured or destroyed in a fair fight, the conquests of 
Harrison and Scott, the capture of York and forts George 
and Niagara, our magnificent victories at sea by the Con- 
stitution over the Gucrricrc, by the Wasp over the Frolic,. 
by the United States over the Macedonia, by the Constitu- 
tion over the jfava, and the final crushing defeat at New 
Orleans, had taught Great Britain to respect the rabble 
whom she looked upon before as rebels fit for the toma- 
hawk of the savage. The best writers and the noblest 
orators in Great Britain condemned the barbarous destruc- 



THE DEARBORNS. 3 I 

tion of our capital, which found no parallel even in the 
bloody Bonaparte, who had taken and held, and left unin- 
jured nearly every capital in Europe; and they condemned 
with indignation the practice of employing against us the 
savages who burned our homes and slaughtered our women 
and children. "Willingly," said the London Statesman, 
"would we throw a vail of oblivion over our transactions at 
Washington. The Cossacks spared Paris, but we spared 
not the capital of America." The British Annual Register 
denounced the proceedings "as a return to the times of 
barbarism!" 

The last war with Great Britain closed with just such a 
thunder-crash as that with which the first war began. The 
gallant Packingham, with an army of veterans fresh from 
the victories of Europe, with valor equal to that which 
breasted the fires of Bunker Hill, staggered vainly against 
the breastworks of our undisciplined but brave army at 
New Orleans, until more than two thousand were killed or 
wounded, while Jackson's loss was but eight killed and 
thirteen wounded. 

Bunker Hill and New Orleans! The Alpha and Omega 
of war with Great Britain taught the British government 
that there was a race beyond the sea with too much of her 
own blood and brains and love of liberty to be ever con- 
quered upon its own soil. 

Gen. Dearborn immediately retired to the comforts of 
private life. In 18 13, thirty-seven years of public service 
found him as poor as when he began, when he married 
Sarah Bowdoin, daughter of William Bowdoin and widow 
of James Bowdoin. the munificent patron of Bowdoin Col- 
lege, which has furnished our city with many of its most 
gifted orators.* The elder general gave up to the younger 
the old Brinley Place at Roxbury, and lived in the Bow- 

* Judge Thomas Diummoncl, lion. John N. Jewett, Hon. Melville W. 
Fuller, George Payson, and John J. Herrick. 



32 THE DEARBORNS. 

doin mansion on Milk Street in Boston until 1826, with 
the exception of two years spent abroad.* President Mon- 
roe appointed him minister to Portugal in 1822, and he 
was unanimously confirmed. His home from 18 15 to 
1826 was one of the centres of all that was interesting in 
art and letters and society. His wife's great wealth and 
unbounded charity, his own friendship with all the famous 
men of America, formed either in the army or during his 
twelve years at Washington brought him to the front at 
all the banquets and dinners and public meetings of Bos- 
ton. Here he was visited by Lafayette, who, as a token 
of esteem, gave to his daughter, the beautiful Mrs. Win- 
gate, a set of china which had belonged to Marie Antoin- 
ette. Threescore years and ten, with all their storms and 
exposure, failed to bow his head, and with the same stately 
dignity which many of us remember in his favorite adju- 
tant, Winfield Scott, he bore up until his seventy -ninth 
year, and then died in the home and in the arms of his 
only son. 

* Bowdoin Block, corner of Milk and liawley Streets, now occupies the 
site of the old mansion where so many notabilities were entertained and where 
was born, in 1809, Hon. Robert C. Winthrop, selected by Congress as the 
leading representative orator of the United States to deliver the oration at 
Yorktown, October 19, 1881. The Dearborns gave a grand ball in this house, 
July 3, 1817, for President Monroe. The visit of Monroe to Boston was a 
brilliant ovation, the whole city, without distinction of party, joining in 
parades, balls, illuminations, and receptions. Gen. Dearborn was chairman 
of the committee. Commodores Bainbridge, Hull, and Perry were there with 
war vessels; also Generals Brooks, Sullivan, Sumner, Crane, Wells, Blake, 
Thorndike, Perkins, and a throng of other officers and military companies. 
A great meeting was had at Bunker Hill on the 4th of July, where Monroe 
expressed a sentiment similar to that of Lincoln at Gettysburg : " The blood 
spilt here roused the whole American people and united them in a common 
cause in defence of their rights — that miion will never be broken." He 
visited Cambridge, and was welcomed by President Kirkland and all the 
faculty and students of Harvard. Then followed a great military parade on 
the common. Harrison Gray Otis gave a party and fire -works display. 
Dearborn, Otis, Quincy, and Gray dined with Monroe at Ex- President John 
Adams. 



THE DEARBORNS. 33 



PART II. 

Time compels me to hurry through the career of the 
younger Dearborn more rapidly than I wish, for it was a 
life not only of remarkable energy, but full of interest and 
beauty. Placed by the affection of President Madison in 
the most lucrative and influential federal office in New 
England before he was thirty years of age, he so ably con- 
ducted himself in it as to be retained there through all 
the administrations of Madison, Monroe, and John Ouincy 
Adams. 

Upon his removal by Jackson in 1829, he was elected to 
the Massachusetts legislature and placed in the executive 
council. Next year he was elected senator from Norfolk 
and member of the State constitutional convention; in 
1832, member of Congress. He was appointed adjt.-gen- 
eral of the State of Massachusetts in 1835, ^^^ ^^^^^^ ^hat 
office until 1843. In 1847, he was elected mayor of Rox- 
bury, and was annually reelected until his death in 185 1. 
In these public, official, and political positions, he con- 
ducted himself with so much energy, fairness, and ability 
that no partisan ever charged him with any want of patri- 
otism, diligence, or fidelity.* In this, perhaps, he was not 
singular. Massachusetts has had other such public ser- 
vants and officers, but while Gen. Dearborn faithfully 
attended his official duties, he performed an amount of 

* Arthur W. Austin, Esq., at a meeting at West Roxbury, August 5, 1851, 
said : " It has been my fortune through almost the whole of my life to be 
ranked among the political antagonists of General Dearborn, but I have never 
heard his integrity in any quarter questioned or impeached, or anything ad- 
vanced in derogation of his claim to entire personal respect. 

" In his characteristics there was nothing selfish, interested, or mercenary; 
having a value in himself that which was outward did not seem to affect him. " 

3 



34 THE DEARBORNS. 

public service for the world at large, without fee or reward, 
which can hardly be matched. Bunker- Hill Monument, 
the Hoosac Tunnel, the Horticultural Society, Mount 
Auburn, and Forest Hills Cemetery, are some of the 
works which speak of his untiring energy and genius. As 
early as i8ii, he was appointed by the authorities of Bos- 
ton to deliver the annual fourth-of-July address. It was 
full of fiery indignation at the insults and wrongs from 
Great Britain, and contained a glowing desire for such a 
monument to be built upon the Charlestown Hills as 
should commemorate the era which gave birth to a nation 
destined to be the most powerful on earth. From that 
day until the final consummation of that grandest monu- 
ment in the world, he was untiring in its advocacy. A 
society was formed, with Webster as its president and 
Everett as its secretary, who labored for years with match- 
less eloquence for this great work. The act of incorpora- 
tion named Dearborn as chairman of the committee to 
solicit subscriptions. The glow of his enthusiasm pro- 
duced the first report, and his continuous efforts by tongue 
and pen kindled and kept alive the brains and hearts of 
those orators who stand confessedly at the head of the 
English-speaking tongue. Every gift of oratory and the 
muses, every appeal to patriotism, every effort of brave 
men and loving women was needed and exercised to pro- 
duce that wonderful monument. Dearborn was chairman 
of the building committee for many years, and Judge 
Warren's history of the proceedings and debates, the din- 
ners and suppers, the committee meetings and speeches of 
the eight men whom he calls the brightest galaxy that the 
country could produce — Webster, Story, Everett, Dear- 
born, J. C. W^arren, Amos Lawrence, Gen. Sullivan, and 
George Blake — fills a portly volume of most interesting 
reading.* It was a task so vast and so difficult of accom- 

* Warren's History of the Bunker-IIill Monument Association. 



THE DEARBORNS. 35 

plishment, and came so near failure and defeat that I 
think it safe to say that without the labors of either Web- 
ster, Everett, or Dearborn it never could have been accom- 
plished.* 

A few weeks ago, in a speech at the Massachusetts 
State Fair, Gov. Butler stated that the Hoosac Tunnel 
was now a self-supporting and paying investment, and 
that the direct increase of value to lands in that vicinity, 
formerly almost valueless, was increased by actual assess- 
ment several millions of dollars. This achievement was 
due more largel}' to Gen. Dearborn than to any other man 

* It is worthy of remembrance in this Society, which owes so much of its 
existence to the Rev. Wm. Barry and his late accomplished wife, Elizabeth 
Willard, vice-regent of the Mt. Vernon's Ladies Association, that the Bunker 
Hill monument was built by her uncle, Solomon Willard. He was unani- 
mously elected architect and superintendent at a full meeting of the building 
committee, Oct. 3, 1825 — Webster, Story, Everett, Dearborn, J. C. Warren, 
Amos Lawrence, Gen. Wm. Sullivan, and George Blake (Warren's " Hist, of 
Bunker-Hill Mon. Ass.," p. 199). Warren says: "Every one conceded to 
him wonderful skill, ingenuity, and fidelity." The building of the monument 
led to the construction of the first railroad in America, and Willard was one 
of the incorporators in March, 1826. Warren says: "Willard refused all 
compensation for his services, which lasted many years; and his services as 
architect and superintendent at ordinary rates, and the amount he saved by 
quarrying his own granite, and in other ways, equalled the whole actual cost 
of the monument. The skill of Willard perfected the whole and made it 
more majestic in its massive composition. He gave to it the strength and 
maturity of his manhood, so that the very soul and fibre of his existence 
were wrought into the mighty fabric from the foundation-stone to the airy 
apex. In view of such sublime devotion, it may be hoped by us that as the 
lover of art, when he visits Rome and views with admiration the dome of 
St. Peters, recalls at once the exalted genius of Michael Angelo, so in future 
ages will the visitor to Bunker Hill, as he gazes upon the imperishable obelisk 
which crowns the metropolis, be reminded of the consummate skill and the 
unmatched, priceless service of Solomon Willard." 

Whoever reads Mrs. Barry's history of this Society (Blanchard's "North- 
west, " p. 457) will long remember the great services she and her husband 
have rendered — not so conspicuous as those of her uncle, but no less endur- 
ing, perhaps — in the formation and endowment of the Chicago Historical 
Society. 



36 THE DEARBORNS. 

in New England. He was one of the earliest and most 
indefatigable in his endeavors to induce the people of 
Massachusetts to connect the Atlantic with the Hudson 
River. 

As early as 1838, he said, "It is the most remarkable 
commercial avenue which was ever opened by man. It 
has no parallel in the proudest days of antiquity, and in- 
stead of the possibility of its ever being rivalled in any 
country, it will itself be triplicated in extent, for the true 
and ultimate terminus is to be on the shores of the Pacific 
Ocean, and the splendid Alexandria of the Columbia 
River will become the entrepot for the products of this 
vast continent, of China and India, of Europe and Africa." 

In a great railroad convention at Portland in 1850, he 
said, "It is but twenty-five years since I proposed that a 
railroad should be constructed from Boston to the Hud- 
son, and that a tunnel be made through the Hoosac Moun- 
tain. For this I was termed an idiot. An idiot I may 
be, but the road is made and the tunnel through the 
Hoosac Mountain is in course of construction." He did 
not live to see his desire accomplished."'^ 

* While in Boston, seeking materials for this paper, I chanced to meet our 
Col. Wentworth and Hon. A. W. H. Clapp of Portland, Me., who served 
together in Congress. Mr. Clapp married the only daughter of Gen. H. A. S. 
Dearborn. He told me that one of Dearborn's remarkable characteristics 
was the accuracy and tenacity of his memory; and to illustrate this, narrated 
the following anecdote: At the great railroad convention in Portland in 1850, 
there were many delegates from the British Provinces, and among them was 
an aged admiral of the British navy. Gen. Dearborn had never seen the 
admiral; but, in the midst of an eloquent oration on the value of great high- 
ways of communication between different lands and nations, he wandered off 
and described with great power and pathos a country and people somewhere, 
long before, where the yellow fever or the cholera was raging to such an extent 
that almost everybody who had the power to escape went away; but one 
young offieer, who, though fully at liberty to go, voluntarily staid by the 
natives and fought death, disease, and horrors until the plague was staid; then 
turning to the old admiral, whose tears were trickling down his face. Gen. 



THE DEARBORNS. 3/ 

it has been my fortune during the last year to pass 
through the three greatest tunnels of the world — the 
Hoosac, Mount Cenis, connecting France with Italy, and 
St. Gothard, connecting Switzerland and Germany with 
Italy. The last two wonderful works have been built in 
countries enjoying the accumulated skill and capital of 
two thousand years, and were aided by the governments 
of France, Italy, and Germany, and I thought with pride 
that the pioneer of these stupendous works was built by 
a State less than one century old, and owed its existence 
to the efforts of one ardent private citizen. 

In 1838, he traveled extensively through our western 
country, and filled the Boston newspapers with glowing 
accounts of its natural resources, and stimulated the move- 
ment of Massachusetts' capital and citizens to this particu- 
lar point. 

His written and spoken contributions to the public, not 
one of which was written for personal reward or gain, 
would fill one hundred volumes. They covered the 
whole range of study and thought. Marshall P. Wilder 
says of him, " No enterprise was too bold for him to 
attempt, no sacrifice was too great for him to make, 
no labor too arduous for him to perform, in order to pro- 
mote the intelligence, the refinement, welfare, and renown 
of his countrymen."'^ 

Dearl)orn welcomed him, as the hero of his tale, to an American audience. 
Mr. Clapp said that later in the day both men were at his house at dinner, 
and when introduced, the admiral asked Gen Dearborn where he learned the 
particulars of that story. Gen. Dearborn answered, that he had read them 
in an obscure paper of New Brunswick, twenty-five years before, and the 
moment he heard the name of the admiral, all the details came back to his 
memory. 

* I can not forbear making at least one quotation from Gen. Dearborn to 
show his flowing and eloquent style and as sounding the key-note of his char- 
acter and principles. It is from an address in 1835, before the Massachusetts 
Society for promoting agriculture. lie raises his subject at every paragraph 



38 THE DEARBORNS. 

In 1829, a (cw gentlemen around Boston formed the 
present wealthy and successful Massachusetts Horticultural 
Society. Gen. Dearborn was its first president and con- 
tinued such for many years. Its annual exhibitions, its 
fairs and banquets have been fav^ored with some of the 
choicest hours and wittiest efforts of Webster, Story, and 
Everett. Dearborn and his successor, Marshall P. Wilder, 
had a way of infusing their own energy into all the men 

from labor to triumph, from the soil to the flower, from the ground to the 
skies : 

"There never has been anything great achieved where there were not difii- 
culties to be encountered. It is thus that the noblest faculties of the mind 
have been wrought up to the e.xercise of their liighest powers, and man to the 
display of his immeasurable resources. Every conception of an important 
truth is accompanied by the cheering belief of witnessing its verification; and 
the triumph over obstructions in its development is as exhilarating to the phi- 
losopher and artist as victory to the warrior. It matters not what is the exag- 
gerated magnitude or apparent insignificance of the inquiry, it can not be 
prosecuted with any prospect of success, unless there is an ardent disposition, 
accompanied by that indomitable spirit of perseverance which puts at defiance 
all hazards and all odds. Whether the object of accomplishment or investi- 
gation be the construction of a Roman aqueduct or the stringing of a lute, the 
geology of the globe or the anatomy of a beetle, the discovery of a new world 
or a new plant, there must be brought into vigorous action the highest powers 
of intellect and the most zealous determination of purpose. There is nothing 
valuable to man or honorable to nations — not an addition has been made to 
the fund of intelligence — not a step taken in the progress of civilization, which 
has not been the result of intense thought and infinite research. It is one of 
the conditions of our existence — the fiat of Omnipotence — that to attain excel- 
lence in even the humblest vocation, there must be untiring industry, sanguine 
hopes, and great labor. What, indeed, were we but for that unquenchable 
thirst of knowledge which no acquisitions can abate — that restless demand for 
action, which is but increased by fruition, and that aspiring reach of imagina- 
tion, which, finding no terrestrial bounds, ranges from the farthest constellation 
in the zodiac to the realms beyond the skies — to an existence as illimitable as 
eternity, and an elevation transcendant as the archangels. Were we not thus 
created and so endowed with an intuitive credence in the immortality of the 
soul, the human race must have i-emained in a state of the most abject ignor- 
ance and degraded barbarism. It is the inspiration of divinity itself which 
animates and urges us on in the interminable career of intellectual attainments 
and moral grandeur." 



THE DEARBORNS. 39 

of genius in their vicinity. Dearborn possessed an insati- 
able love of the beautiful in nature and art. He studied 
every flower and fruit, every leaf and tree. His orations 
before that society and similar associations through New 
England awakened such an interest in horticulture that 
even before his death the rock-ribbed, rugged old State of 
Massachusetts became more beautifully embellished than 
the Northern Hesperides. Not only did the people near 
Boston clothe their whole earth with beauty, but as a prac- 
tical business operation their exports of fruit increased a 
thousandfold. 

The society which he erected is now one of the richest 
as well as one of the most useful in Boston. I had the 
pleasure of attending its annual exhibition held last Sep- 
tember, and found an elegant stone temple filled with the 
richest profusion of flowers and fruits that any climate has 
yet produced. From the canvas -covered walls looked 
down a company of the most worthy men of Boston, and 
in the first place of honor was a portrait of its first presi- 
dent. That is just and well, but the real record of his 
genius and taste buds and flowers in all the fields and 
groves, the public parks and private walks of New Eng- 
land. As Dr. Putnam said, "There are thousands who 
may never speak his name, who unconsciously follow his 
teachings and copy his ideas in the flowers and trees that 
adorn their homes and delight their eyes. There is some- 
thing of his influence in the bridal wreath that graces and 
gladdens the brow of beauty. There is something of it 
in the luscious fragrance of every basket of summer fruit 
that enriches the festive board. He, more than any one 
man, put in train those agencies which introduced to the 
knowledge and love of all classes of our people a greatly- 
extended variety both of the useful and ornamental pro- 
ducts of the ground. He loved the beautiful and taught 
his countrymen to love it. He introduced new forms of 



40\ THE DEARBORNS. 

it and contributed to the permanent adorning of the fair 
face of Nature." 

It was from this exquisite taste of Dearborn and the 
enthusiastic spirit and warm vitalizing eloquence, with 
which he always carried captive the sympathetic and sus- 
ceptible men with whom he came in contact, that our 
whole Nation is indebted for an entire revolution in the 
way of burying our dead. In 1829, there was no great 
rural cemetery in this country nor in all Europe, excepting 
Pere La Chaise in Paris, but with Gen. Dearborn's accept- 
ance of the presidency of the Massachusetts Horticultural 
Society began a new era of sepulture. 

Dr. Bigelow, Judge Story, Edward Everett, Abbot Law- 
rence, and other noble men of Boston had talked of a 
rural cemetery, but when Dearborn took practical hold of 
the matter, selected the ground, planned the improvements, 
measured the walks and drives, then Mount Auburn was 
born. Putnam says, "With an eye so keen to detect the 
beautiful and a heart so warmly loving it, he knew how to 
make the most of every nook and dell, the tangled bog, 
the sandy level, the abrupt declivity, every tree and shrub 
and rock — in a word, he, after God, created Mount Auburn. 
His zeal and vigor, taste and labor, were the most promi- 
nent and efficacious elements in the inception and accom- 
plishment of the work. And there lies Mount Auburn 
with its sacred beauty, its holy fitness for its object, with 
its quiet enclosure, its solemn and tender associations, its 
thousands of gleaming monuments, itself in its entireness 
a magnificent and beautiful monument to him, to his in- 
dustry and taste — his affectionate reverence for the claims 
of the dead and the sorrows of the living." 

But not here alone; the hills of Roxbury, where Wash- 
ington's cannon once commanded the British army to eva- 
cuate Boston, offered still greater natural beauties to Dear- 
born's artistic eye, and he spent not only months but years 



THE DEARBORNS. 41 

in developing and beautifying tliere tlie Forest-Hills Cem- 
etery. He planned it all and superintended it all, not for 
pay, but for pure love of work and its results. From 
these exquisite models of gardens for the dead sprang 
similar rural cemeteries all over our country, until every 
city and village vied with each other in the sacred work. 
I remember well how early my own love for such places 
was awakened. In 1850, I attended the dedication of the 
cemetery at Utica, N.Y., when Mr. William Tracy was the 
orator to a throng of the most gifted men of Oneida. 
There were present the Spensers, Denies, Kirklands, Sey- 
mours, Johnstons, Bacons, Roscoe Conkling and the old 
chief of the Oneidas, nearly one hundred years of age. I 
have visited Mount Auburn, Greenwood, Laurel Hill, Fort 
Hill, Mount Hope, and nearly, every cemetery between 
Boston and Buffalo, all of which places, being the highest 
in their vicinity, were once the scenes of Revolutionary 
conflict, and are now dotted with monuments of our dead 
warriors of many wars. I remember, too, my visit to Pere 
La Chaise,* to visit the unmarked grave of Marshal Ney, 
where we chanced to meet old Victor Hugo bearing 
his last son to his tomb, — old Victor Hugo, whose 
description of Waterloo will be read and admired so long 
as a militant world exists; but none of these visits im- 

* On the 28th of December, 1873, I visited this famous cemetery in com- 
pany with Mr. S. H. K., Jr., and his mother, whose thorough culture and 
historical information made every hour agreeable and instructive. 

We had been to the Hotel Dieu, the oldest hospital in Europe, and to Hos- 
pital Lariboissiere, the great modern hospital for the poor. All the avenues 
leading to Pere La Chaise were unusually crowded. After we had visited the 
graves of Marshals Ney, Davoust, and Massena, the poet Beranger, and the 
garlanded sarcophagus of Abelard and Eloise, we turned to leave the cemetery 
and were met by an immense funeral procession, headed by Victor Hugo, 
then about seventy-two years of age, coming to bury the last of his children, 
Francois Victor Hugo, the translator of Shakespeare and a man of the highest 
promise. With him walked C.ambetta, Ale.xandre Dumas, Jules Simon, and 
a host of the leading men of France. Louis Blanc pronounced a touching 



42 THE DEARBORNS. 

pressed me as did that to the graves of these Dearborns at 
Forest-Hills Cemetery. They lie on the highest ground of 
that eminence, with beautiful monumental marbles erected 
by a grateful public to their memory. It was a soft and 
lovely September-Sunday sunset, and as I thought of the 
brave and generous and gifted laborers, who, after so much 
work in their country's service, slept their last sleep within 
sound of the city's roar and the ocean's swell, it seemed 
as though the requiem which vibrated from the trees over 
their graves was carried from hill to hill, from the Atlantic 
Ocean to our own resounding shore at Graceland.* 

oration by the side of the old man, and expressed the sympathies which 
throbbed through the hearts of all Paris. 

Surroimded by the tombs of the most famous of the sons of France of this 
century, and by the living celebrities of the new Republic, we looked upon 
the bowed head of Victor Hugo, and forgot in him the statesman, the poet, 
the orator, in utter pity for the man — for the father — who had given to Pere 
La Chaise the last of his children. The great philanthropist had claimed for 
forty years that "all humanity was his family." He now stood without father, 
mother, sister, brother, wife, or child, and while he wept, "all humanity" 
shared his sorrow and took him into its inmost heart. 

* If there was a name more thoroughly embalmed in the hearts of the 
patriots than all others, it was that of Gen. Joseph Warren, who fell at the 
battle of Bunker Hill. Orators, poets, and painters have vied with each 
other to honor his memory. At Forest- Hills Cemetery, on the summits of 
two adjoining hills called Mount Warren and Mount Dearborn, repose the 
bones of those two physicians who fought together in 1775. A deep dell of 
exquisite loveliness runs between the two heii^hts. In the first annual report 
of the Forest- Hills commissioners. Gen. H. A. S. Dearborn suggested the pro- 
priety of erecting a bronze statue of Warren on this hill, named in his honor, 
and near which he was born and lived. In this connection it is interesting to 
note that within a hundred yards of this Hall resides a venerable lady, Mrs. 
Mary P. Tucker (mother of Mr. Joseph F. Tucker, a member of this Society), 
whose father, Professor Hezekiah Packard, was in that famous battle of 1775, 
was present when the remains of Warren Were removed from the battle-field, 
and was present in 1825 when Lafayette laid the corner-stone of the monu- 
ment and Webster delivered his immortal oration. 

One of the officers and active members of the Bunker-Hill- Monument Asso- 
ciation was Franklin Dexter, whose widow is a granddaughter of Col. Prescott, 
the commander at the battle. This venerable lady was present on the 1 7th 
June, 1881, when the beautiful bronze statue of Col. Prescott was unveiled 
and Robert C. Winthrop delivered his masterly oration. 



THE DEARBORNS. 43 

There are few names in our history which better repre- 
sent in two generations the record and terrible experiences 
of war and the beaming and beautiful works of peace than 
the Dearborns — few men in two succeeding generations of 
father and son whose history so fully represents the mili- 
tary, political, social, and business operations and vicissi- 
tudes of America. 

The first sprang '^nto undying fame when he hurried 
over the public highway from New Hampshire to Cam- 
bridge after the echo of the guns from Lexington, and 
took his baptism of fire and blood on Bunker Hill. The 
younger gathered his laurels when "grim-visaged war had 
smoothed his wrinkled front"; when his Country was at 
peace with the world, and through the pleasant ways of 
commerce, of art, of letters, of flowers and fruit and poetry, 
he walked through a long life of companionship with the 
most gifted scholars and orators our Country has pro- 
duced. The turbulent energy of all classes of men during 
our contest for independence had not become enervated 
by luxury, and though the younger Dearborn found fort- 
une smiling and a liberal income flowing into his treasury, 
he carried into and through his own generation the rest- 
less energy which he inherited from the warrior of the 
Revolution, and work of every kind was to him the very 
breath of life. He studied all science, all art, all com- 
merce, all literature; he brought home to the minds of 
men the vast possibilities which lay before our Country in 
the West; and to the hearts of lovers of the beautiful, 
the creations of fancy and the delights of a beautiful home 
and an unrepulsive grave. He, more than any other man 
in New England, made the rock-ribbed homesteads of his 
neighborhood to blossom with flowers and fruits, and its 
graves to perpetuate in external beauty the loftiest ideals 
of those who came to visit their treasures. 

The career of the father coming upon the stage froni 



44 THE DEARBORNS. 

the sulphur call of Lexington, rolling back the flower of 
British veterans with the most deadly destruction ever to 
that period experienced, and never before or since ap- 
proached, except at New Orleans; marching, swimming, 
starving from Cambridge to Quebec, leading his men 
against the Gibraltar of Canada, made immortal by Wolfe 
and Montgomery; leading his New-Hampshire boys with 
the mad Arnold and the heroic Scammel to the great vic- 
tory of Saratoga; then beneath the eye of his peerless 
friend and hero on the bloody field of Monmouth; and on 
and on to the glorious culmination at Yorktown: — that 
career seems like the great roll of a thunder-storm, before 
which one stands mute, feeling that the circumstances and 
consequences are all phenomenal, and that none but the 
great God of battles can know what shall come next. 
But the career of the son seems like a beautiful river flow- 
ing through a country at first wild and unnavigable, like 
his own Kennebec or Merrimac, carrying beauty and life 
through all its hills and mountains, its fields and gardens, 
washing the rural homes of men who have learned to love 
Nature for its own sake, proud of their ancestry and look- 
ing fondly at faces and forms made real to them by the 
brush of Copley, Trumbull, and Stuart; homes where 
"plenty leaps to laughing life" under the touch of industry; 
and where such brains and hearts as Longfellow, Lowell, 
Hawthorne, Holmes, Whittier, Dana, Emerson, and Win- 
throp fill the every-day of their sphere with love and sen- 
timent tuned to harmony. 

Some of you have known and witnessed similar careers 
to the elder Dearborn, but twenty years of peace and 
prosperity have made us feel that organized and hellish 
passion will never again drench our land in blood or fire 
our forts and capitals with flame; and so I repeat, the 
career of the father is phenomenal, and we hope need not 
again be developed in America. 



thl: dearborns. 45 

But the career of the younger Dearborn is an example 
which all can imitate. His energy, like the steam-locomo- 
tive which he prophesied fifty years ago would yet travel 
from ocean to ocean, will never seem common; his exqui- 
site taste will be the gift only of the few ; but no well-born 
American need despair of approximating a career whose 
chief trait was good-will to all, and a desire to make the 
world richer by commerce, easier by science, and more 
lovely by flowers surrounding every home and embellish- 
ing every grave. 



46 • THE DEARBORNS. 

At the close of Mr. Goodwin's lecture, Hon. John Went- 
worth moved that the thanks of the Society be tendered 
to Mr. Goodwin for his able and interesting address, and 
that a copy of the same be requested to be placed in the 
archives of the Society. And he wished the audience 
would excuse him for saying that he hoped that the re- 
search that Mr. Goodwin had manifested, and that the 
very interesting manner in which he has handled his sub- 
ject would be a model for other lectures. 

"Some of our lectures abound in facts; but these facts 
are not handled in a manner to make them interesting, 
whilst other lectures abound in eloquent expressions with- 
out the facts to make them instructive. This lecture will 
bear repeating; and if Mr. Goodwin was only a profes- 
sional, it would be a good one to travel over the country 
with. I am surprised that we have never heard from Mr. 
Goodwin before, and I hope we shall often hear from him 
hereafter. I see many around me who are in the habit of 
passing their summers in the vicinity of Hampton, N. H., 
at the ocean beach, where the birthplace of Gen. Dearborn 
is pointed out. Since this lecture, that place will possess 
additional interest. 

"Having expressed my views elaborately as to the public 
services of Gen. Dearborn, at the unveiling of the Memo- 
rial Tablet to mark the site of old Fort Dearborn, 21 
May, 188 1, I will say no more of him than that history 
records no other man who was at the battle of Bunker 
Hill, the surrenders of Burgoyne and Cornwallis, and then 
took an active part in the war of 18 12. He was among 
the very first men to respond to the call of his country, 
and among the very last to leave the field of battle. I 
doubt if there has been a man of such humble preten- 
tions with so valuable and long-continued public services. 
Although born and raised in the same State with Gen. 
Dearborn, and familiar from childhood with the region 



THE DEARBORNS. 



47 



from which he so promptly started after hearing of the 
battle of Lexington, I have no remembrance of ever see- 
ing him, as he died June 6, 1829; but his son, Gen. Henry 
Alexander Scammell Dearborn, who studied law with my 
professor whilst I was at the Harvard Law University, 
Justice Joseph Storey, I was well acquainted with. When 
that son-in-law of his, who also now lives at Portland, 
Maine, so full of honors and of the respect of all who 
know him, Hon. Asa W. H. Clapp, was in Congress, he 
was often at Washington and I often met him in Boston, 
and he was at least once in Chicago. He was a man of 
resolution, of great industry, varied tastes and acquire- 
ments — one of those rare men who could gain a reputation 
in handling any matter to which his attention might be 
called. He was a Massachusetts State senator, a congress- 
man, a collector of customs, a soldier of the war of 18 12, 
mayor of Roxbury, and an author of great repute. His 
'Life of Christ' was in advance of anything of the kind 
of his day; but its want of denominational bias kept it 
from that publicity to which his research and talent.s 
entitled it. 

"Mr. President:— I consider that it is one of the main 
objects of historical societies to connect the past with the 
present, and I am always pleased when I can mention 
some living descendant of the honored men concernino- 
whom this society is addressed. There is but one descend- 
ant bearing the name of these two honored Gens. Dear- 
born, Henry George Raleigh Dearborn of Roxbury, Mass., 
a resident of Chicago in 1838, and afterward of Winnebago 
County, in this State. There was no one of our early set- 
tlers more respected and now more favorably remembered 
than Henry Thurston of Harlaem, Winnebago County, an 
emigrant from Lancaster, Mass. Mr. Dearborn married 
his daughter, Sarah M., July 6, 1840, a sister of Mrs. 
Elizabeth Thurston, who died in this city, April 20, 1879, 



48 THE DEARBORNS. 

the wife of our respected fellow-citizen, Stephen W. Clary, 
and also sister of John H.Thurston, a prominent merchant 
of Rockford. 111. 

"One of the highest compliments paid to Gen. Dearborn 
is the fact that whilst the names of so many of our streets 
have been changed to gratify the whims of our aldermen, 
no attempt has been made to change that of Dearborn 
Street. Not only is this the case, but the name of Dear- 
born continues to be prefixed to institutions, enterprises, 
and objects which it is the desire of projectors to honor." 

Hon. J. Young Scammon said: 

"I rise to second the motion of Colonel Wentworth. 
I was not, like him and General Henry Dearborn, a 
native of the Granite State; but my father was. My 
father, Eliakim Scammon, like General Dearborn, emi- 
grated to the Kennebec country in Maine at an early 
day, when it was the District of Maine, and both settled 
in the same town, where the early days of my childhood 
and youth were spent. My father lived in the eastern 
part of the town, known as East Pittston, about seven 
miles from the Kennebec River. The Dearborn farm was 
in the west portion of the town, occupying a high and 
commanding situation not far from the river. The village 
of that part of Pittston, called Gardiner, after the separa- 
tion and incorporation of the latter, became a centre of 
trade; and at this point was the ferry, which was on the 
great road from the Kennebec to the Damariscotta and 
Sheepscot Rivers, and the salt water in the direction toward 
the old town of Wiscasset, the county-seat of Lincoln Co. 
General Dearborn formerly lived in a large two-story house 
in Gardiner, opposite and almost directly in front of the 
ferry landing. His farm on the other side of the river was 
kept in fine order and well stocked. It was a pattern farm. 
I frequently passed it. I recollect how my childish curi- 



THE DEARBORNS. 49 

osity was gratified by the novel sight in that country of a 
donkey, which the General sent home from Portugal when 
he was minister to that kingdom. 

"My grandfather, David Young, like General Dearborn, 
was in the Revolutionary War, and among our forces 
which w^ent to Canada to attack Quebec. He was in 
Arnold's expedition which went up the Kennebec River. 
Our family, like General Dearborn's, was in politics Jeffer- 
sonian- Republicans, as distinguished from the Federal 
Republicans, and always took an interest in political 
affairs. The Dearborns, Youngs, and Scammons were all 
devoted Republicans. My grandfather represented his 
town in the general court of Massachusetts, before the 
separation, as General Dearborn did in Congress the repre- 
sentative district in which it was situated. 

"I do not recollect ever seeing Gen. Henry Dearborn, 
though I may have done so. His son. Gen. Henry A. S. 
Dearborn, I knew, and have seen him in Chicago. He, at 
one time, about 1838 probably, came to Jacksonville, in 
this State, with a view of making his home here; but he 
found the country entirely too new for his habits of life, 
and left at once for his old home in Massachusetts. When 
I subsequently met him, it was in Hubbard & Co.'s 
warehouse on North -Water Street. He had then, I 
think, been out to visit his son on Rock River. He was 
a very remarkable as well as distinguished man. His 
spare time and thoughts were devoted to matters of 
public and general interest, and he was one of the very 
few men who saw, before the days of railroads with us, 
the great advantage of quick and rapid communication 
between the lake region and the seaboard. I never pass 
Booth's great piscatory establishment at the corner of 
Lake and State Streets, which is usually overflowing with 
the productions of the waters from Oregon and the Colum- 
bia River to the coast of Maine and the Penobscot, without 
4 



50 THE DEARBORNS. 

being reminded that the 'young general', as he was called, 
said to me, on the occasion referred to in Hubbard & Co.'s 
warehouse, that railroad communication with the East 
would not only furnish us a market for our cereals and 
other productions, but in return would also bring us fresh 
food for our table from the briny deep. I was at that 
time greatly interested in promoting railroad communica- 
tion with the East, preparatory to extending our contem- 
plated roads to the Northwest. The impression he made 
upon me at that short interview has remained to this day. 

"I knew his three sisters. One was married to Hon. 
Joshua Wingate, formerly of Bath, Maine, a member of 
Congress at one time, I think, from the Lincoln district. 
He subsequently removed to Portland, having been 
appointed collector of U. S. customs for that district. 
The other two sisters were married in Pittston, one to Dr. 
James Parker, who was a senator in the general court of 
Massachusetts, and a Republican member of Congress 
before the separation. The other sister, I think a half- 
sister, was married to Mr. Rufus Gay, for many years a 
successful merchant in Pittston and Gardiner. P"or the 
last three years before I left Maine, in 1835, they resided 
in Gardiner. I was in the habit on Sundays of attending 
a small religious meeting in Gardiner, to which the Parkers 
and Gays both belonged. Sympathy of belief created 
intimate association, and there were probably few months 
during this period that I was not hospitably entertained at 
one or other of these houses on Sunday. These memories 
are among the red-letter days of my life. 

"The name Dearborn has a double charm for me. It 
was associated with all the days of my youth and early 
manhood, and though neither the Dearborn Block nor the 
Dearborn Observatory at the Chicago University was 
named for General Dearborn, they were for a distant rela- 
tive around whose name cluster all the blissful associations 
of my early Chicago life. 



THE DEARBORNS. ^j 

"I thank the orator of the evening not only for the honor 
he has done to my ancestral home and its early inhabit- 
ants, for the faithful and careful labor which has produced 
so true and faithful historical portraits of the two distin- 
guished General Dearborns, but for the rare skill and -race 
in which he has set those presentations. Never have we 
hstened m this hall to a more interesting paper In his 
paper he combined the orator, the historian, and the essay- 
ist. It IS an honor to us and to our institution." 

Hon. E. B. Washburne said, while offering this vote of 
thanks to Mr. Goodwin, which was so appropriate and well 
deserved, he thought there should be added a resolution 
tendenng the warmest thanks and gratitude of the Society 
to the gentlemen whose liberality had secured the admir- 
able portrait of General Dearborn, which was hereafter to 
adorn our walls. Connected as the name of General Dear- 
born was so intimately with Chicago, the gift of his por- 
trait would always be gratefully remembered. He bec^c^ed 
therefore, to move that the cordial thanks of the Sodety 
be- tendered to the donors, whose names were on the tablet. 

Hon. Isaac N. Arnold, president of the Society, said: 
"Before submitting the resolutions, I can not forbear 
expressing the great pleasure with which I have listened 
to the paper which has been read. The subject has not 
only great local but national interest, and the treatment 
has been admirable. Many very interesting papers have 
been read before our Society, but I am sure all will a^^ree 
with me that it is rare for this, or, indeed, any Histodcal 
Society m the country to listen to one of such merit It 
IS a prose-poem with the accuracy of history. Mr Good- 
win has united the picturesque description and glowin- 
sentiment of poetry and eloquence " 



52 THE DEARBORNS. 

Mr. Arnold then put the question on the resolutions and 
they were unanimously adopted and the meeting adjourned. 



Letter from Hon. Robert C. Winthrop, president of the 
Massachusetts Historical Society: 

"Boston, 26th Dec, 1883. 
"Dear Mr. Goodwin: 

"I received and have read with interest your account of 
the Dearborns in a Chicago newspaper of the 19 inst. You 
will doubtless publish the whole of your paper in pamphlet, 
and I shall be glad to have a copy. My relations with 
both the Generals were close. The father's last wife was 
my mother's aunt, Mrs. Sarah Bovvdoin — the widow of 
James Bowdoin, son of Governor Bowdoin. She was her- 
self a Bowdoin, the only cousin of her first husband and 
niece of your wife's ancestress, Elizabeth Bowdoin Pitts. 

"My father's family always dined with the Dearborns on 
Thanksgiving Day and the Dearborns always dined at my 
father's on Christmas Day. They were our nearest of kin 
at that time in Boston, and rarely a week passed without 
their being at our house. 

"The younger General Dearborn was adjutant-general 
of' Massachusetts while I was aide-de-camp of more than 
one of our governors — Davis, Armstrong, and Everett — 
and we were much together on parade days and at reviews. 
They were noble men — father and son — for whom I had a 
warm regard. Yours truly, 

"Rob't C. Winthrop." 



the dearborns. 53 

Hawthorn Cottage, Boston Highlands, 

January 7th, 1884. 

My Dear Sir; — Allow me to thank you for the great 
pleasure the perusal of the sketches of my beloved and 
honored father and grandfather have given myself and 
family. Your treatment of the subject, I think, has 
evinced great good taste and judgment in the selection 
of the most important and interesting periods in their 
history. 

I feel under great obligations to you and the gentlemen 
associated with you. 

The portrait by Gilbert Stuart was painted in 18 12. Of 
the six attempts that have been made to copy it, this is 
the most satisfactory. It gives me great pleasure to know 
that a portrait of my grandfather is in the Chicago His- 
torical Society. 

My family unite with me in kind regards. 

Very respectfully, ■ 

H. G. R. Dearborn. 
Daniel Goodwin, Jr. 



INDEX 



A. 

Adams, John, Kennebec Comp'y, 2 1 : 

Dexter, 23, 32. 
Adams, John Quincy, ^^. 
Adams, Samuel, 10. 
Albany, march to, 17. 
Amory, Thomas C, 22. 
Arnold, Benedict, 13, 14, 15, 16. 
Arnold, Isaac N., 3, 14, 51. 
Auburn, Mount, 34, 40. 



Barry, Mr. and Mrs. William, 35. 

Bartlett, Gen., 21. 

Bartlett, Mary, 21. 

Blake, George, 34. 

Blatchford, E. W., 3. 

Bowdoin Block, 32. 

Bowdoin College, 31. 

Bowdoin, Gov. James, 10, 21, 52. 

Bowdoin, James, 31, 52. 

Bowdoin, Sarah, 31, 52. 

Brooks, Col., Gen., and Gov., 19, 32. 

Bunker Hill, battle of, 12, 42, 43, 46. 

Bunker-Hill Monument, 34, 35. 

Bunker-Hill Monument Association, 

34, 42- 
Burgoyne, 16. 



Campbell, Judge James V., 28 n. 
Cambridge, Mass., 11, 32. 
Chamberlain, Judge Mellen, 13. 
Chicago Historical Society, 2, 51. 
Chicago University, 8. 
Clapp, Asa W. H., 36, 47. 
Clary, Mr. and Mrs. Stephen W., 

47-8. 
Conkling, Roscoe, 41. 
Crerar, John, 3. 



D. 



Dana, R. H., Jr., 44. 

Dearborn, Henry, 2, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 
14, 17, 18, 32; birth and ancestry, 
8, 9; physician, 9; soldier, ii; first 
battle, 12; Quebec, expedition to, 
13; Saratoga, 14; Ticonderoga, 14; 
Germantovvn, 17; Monmouth, 18; 
Yorktovvn, 19; Newburgh, 19; dis- 
charged in 1783, 19; in Congress, 
22, 23; secretary of war, 23; col- 
lector at Boston, 25; war of 181 2, 
27; captures Forts Niagara and 
George, 29; maj.-gen., 26; minis- 
ter to Portugal, 32; marries Mary 
Bartlett, 1771, 21, Mrs. Marble, 
1780, 21, Mrs. Bowdoin, 1813, 31 ; 
death and burial at Brinley Place, 
32; final interment at Forest-Hills 
Cemetery, 42. 

Dearborn, Henry A. S., birth, 1780, 
21; colleges, graduates, 1803, 25; 
builds Fort Preble, 26 ; collector 
at Boston, 21, 25, 26; State sena- 
tor, 33; constitutional convention, 
member of Congress, adjutant-gen- 
eral of Massachusetts, mayor of 
Roxbury, 33 ; public enterprises, 
34; railroads, 36; his oratory, 37, 
38 ; Massachusetts Horticultural 
Society, 38; Mount Auburn, 40; 
Forest-Hills Cemetery, 41 ; grave 
of, 42. 

Dearborn, H. (J. R., 15, 22, 25, 47, 

• 53- 

Dearborn, tort, 2, S, 17, 24, 46. 
Dearborn Observatory, 8, 50. 
Dexter, Mr. and Mrs. Franklin, 42. 
Dexter, Samuel, father of Franklin, 

grandfather of Wirt, 23. 
Dexter, Wirt, 3, 23. 
Donelson, Fort, 8. 



INDEX. 



55 



Urummond, Judge, 31. 
Dwight, Benjamin W., 28. 
Dwight, Col. James F., 28. 

E. 

I<;verett, Edward, 34, 35. 50. 



Fairbank, N. K,, 3. 
Farquhar, Col. Francis U., 22. 
Field, Marshall, 3. 
Fort Dearborn, 46. 
Fuller, M. W., 31. 

G. 

Gardiner, 21, 48. 

Gates, Gen., 14, 17. 

Gay, Rufus, 48. 

Germantown, 17. 

(joodwin, Daniel, Jr., 25; at Boston, 
13, 36; at Hoosac, Mount Cenis, 
and St. Gothard Tunnels, 37; at 
Mass. Horticultural Society, 39; 
Pere La Chaise, 41 ; Forest Hills, 
42; resolution of thanks to, 46, 51 ; 
letters to, 52, 53. 

( Iraceland Cemetery, 42. 

H. 

Hager, Albert D., secretary, 3. 
Herrick, John J., 31. 
Hobart, Lieut. Augustus, 22. 
Holmes, Oliver W., 44. 
Hoosac Tunnel, 34, 35, 36. 
Howard, Jacob M., 22. 
Hugo, Victor, 41. 



Jefferson, President, 3, 23. 
Jewett, John N., 31. 

K. 

Kennebec Company, 21. 
Kennebec River, 21, 46. 
Kerfoot, S. H., Jr., 40. 
Kirkland, President John T. 



Lafayette, 18, 32, 42. 
Lamed, Gen. Charles, 22. 



Lawrence, Amos, 34. 

Lee, Col. William R., 25. 

Lee, Hannah Swett, wife of H. A. S. 

Dearborn, 25. 
Lexington, 11. 
Louis, Phillipe, 22. 
Lowell, J. R., 44. 



M. 



Madison, President, 3, 25, 26, 30, 33. 
Monroe, President, 3, 32, 33. 
Massachusetts Horticultural Society, 

34, 38, 40. 
Monmouth, battle of, 18. 
Morgan, Gen., 14, 15. 
Mount Auburn, 34, 40. 

N. 

New- Hampshire boys, 11, 12, 14, 
16, 17, 19. 

O. 

Osgood, Col. and daughter, 21. 
Otis, Harrison Gray, 32. 



Packard, Prof. Hezekiaii, 42. 

Parker, James, 50. 

Payson, George, 31. 

Pere La Chaise, 40. 

Perry's victory, 30. 

Pitts, Elizabeth hiowdoin, 52. 

Pitts, James, 21. 

Pitts, John, 21. 

Pitts, Lendall, 21. 

Pitts, Samuel, 22. 

Pittston, town of, 21, 22, 46, 48, 49. 

Preble, Fort, 22. 

Prescott, Col. William, 42. 

Putnam, Rev. George, pastor of the 
old first church where Apostle 
Eliot preached, 40; eulogy on H. 
A. S. Dearborn, 39, 40. 



Quebec, expedition to, 13. 

R. 
Railroad convention, 36. 



/> / 



56 



INDEX. 



Reid, Gen. George, 20. 

S. 

Saratoga, battle of, 14, 15. 

Scammon, J. Young, remarks, 48. 

Scammon, Eliakim, 48. 

Scammell, Col. Alexander, 14, 18, 19. 

Scott, Gen. Winfield, 30, 32. 

Skinner, Mark, 3. 

Stark, Col. John, 1 1. 

Story, Justice Joseph, 22, 25, 34, 40, 

45. 47- 
Strong, Gov. Caleb, 27, 28. 
Strong, I{lder John's descendants, 

28 n. 
Strong, Gen. William Emerson, 28 n. 
Stuart, Gilbert, 2, 44, 53. 
Sullivan, Gen. and Gov. James, 18, 

19, 22, 32. 
Sullivan, Gen. William, 34. 



Talleyrand, 22. 

Thurston, Henry, 45, 47. 

Thurston, John H., 48. 

Ticonderoga, 14. 

Tracy, Wm., orator at Utica, 41. 

Tucker, Joseph F., 42. 



Tucker, Mrs. Mary W, 42. 
Tuthill, Richard Stanley, 28 n. 

W. 

Warner, Col. and Mrs. Jonathan, 21. 
Warren, Judge George W., 34. 
Warren, Dr. J. C, 34. 
Warren, Gen. Joseph, 42. 
Washington, President, 3, 7, 17, 18, 

22. 
Waterman, James Shields, 3. 
Washburne, E. B., remarks, 51. 
Webster, Daniel, 17, 23, 34. 
Wentworth, Col. John, 3, 23, 25, 36; 

remarks, 46; genealogy quoted, 21. 
Whi>tler, Capt. John, 3, 16, 24. 
Willard, Solomon, 35. 
Williams, Gen. A. S., 22. 
Wilson, Gen. James Grant, 24, 25. 
Wingate, Gen. Joshua W., 50. 
Wingate, Mrs., 32, 50. 
Wilder, Marshall P., 37, 38. 
Winthrop, Robert C, 32, 42, 44, 52. 

Y. 

Yorktown, 19, 32. 
Y'oung, David, 49. 



FERQUS PRINTINQ COMPANV, CHICAQO. 



/ DD 



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